Look at the image on your screen to spot the original long rectangular stone hall with its steep pitched roof and prominent vertical buttresses, marking exactly what once stood right in front of you.
Welcome to the ghost of Saint Clare's Priory. In fourteen ninety-seven, King John the First and Queen Christina donated the former royal vegetable gardens to establish a monastery for the Poor Clares, a Catholic order of nuns. The Queen chipped in forty Rhenish Guilders, roughly ten thousand U-S dollars today, to get construction moving. By August eleven, fifteen oh five, they consecrated a sprawling complex featuring a dormitory, a refectory for dining, a church, and an infirmary.
You would think royal backing guaranteed smooth sailing. But the Protestant Reformation soon swept through, and public opinion turned against mendicant orders, religious groups that relied entirely on daily charity. The locals nicknamed them the beggar nuns, decided they were an unfair financial burden on top of regular church taxes, and promptly shut their wallets.
By fifteen twenty-seven, the priory was in such deep financial trouble that the abbess resorted to smuggling a chest of money to desperately poor sister nuns in Odense. She hid the cash transfer entirely because she feared the public would openly mock the order if they knew just how broke they really were.
Things went from bad to worse. The city fathers explicitly banned the nuns from collecting alms on the street. The sisters had to rely on friars who were only allowed to beg forty miles outside the city, making food transport a total logistical nightmare. Finally, in fifteen thirty-six, Denmark officially became Lutheran. The Crown seized the property, and the nuns left the order.
The Crown transformed the largest building into the Royal Mint in fifteen forty-one. Today, this street is still called Gammel Mønt, or Old Mint, even though the physical buildings burned to the ground in the great fire of seventeen twenty-eight.
You can explore this historic stretch of street every day from seven AM to six PM. Imagine the lost echoes of this street before we move along to the next site.
